It’s Cowgirl Night at The Fitzgerald. Audience members enter the venue to be greeted by Mil (Jo Bentley), a vision in cowboy hat, cut-off denims and yee-haw silver boots, quizzing them as to their preferred beverage and giving the impression of someone out for, if not a very good time, at least an inebriated one.
Precise credits are hard to find for Fine Line so one assumes performers Jo Bentley and Katie Utting collaborated on the script and direction.
Mil literally bumps into Josie (Katie Utting) during Cowgirl Night. They are there for different reasons, which reflect their personalities. Mil is enjoying a boozy girls’ night out, while Josie is reluctantly engaging in a bonding experience with staff from her office for whom she feels responsible. But they have met before, and it did not end well. Mil is anxious to explore past events, while Josie would rather draw a line under them.
Scenes in the present alternate with those from the recent past when Josie, a young counsellor, was assigned to work with teenage Mil who, one infers, had a father who drank heavily and an erratic and manipulative mother. Mil was not above being manipulative herself and used Josie’s office as a crash pad, out of office hours, to avoid her unhappy home. Josie was aware this compromised her professional guidelines but allowed the practice to not only continue, but for the two of them to become closer friends leading to an inevitable crisis.
Bentley and Utting work hard to create a convincing club atmosphere, scrambling over furniture to suggest a crowded dancefloor and leading the audience in the compulsory sing-along to "Sweet Caroline".
But Fine Line is an uneven play. The counselling sessions between Mil and Josie, which ought to establish the background and motivation of the characters, are sketchy and underdeveloped. The audience must mentally fill in gaps in the narrative, and the moral dilemma of Josie compromising her professional standards is not dramatically explored. Having Josie give in to crude blackmail rather than accept or challenge the consequences of her actions feels like a cheat.
The counselling scenes are played on the raised stage at The Fitzgerald, while the club sequences are staged on the floor immediately in front of, or around, the audience. As the dance floor is illuminated only by the natural lighting from the windows, there are times when the actors’ faces are, annoyingly, obscured by shadow.
Fine Line works better as a study of damaged individuals working to help each other than as a morality play. Alone, the character of Mil could become tiresome, constantly in your face and demanding you play along, but interacting with the more restrained Josie brings out a less strident, more caring aspect. Bentley and Utting work well together and have sufficient chemistry to lend credibility to the relationship between the characters moving from professional to personal.
Fine Line would benefit from revisions to better explore the dramatic tension arising from a counsellor crossing the moral line and compromising professional standards but succeeds as an examination of the complexities of friendship.